APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY

This atricle of mine is published on CONQUEST-the Online Edition, 2009 of Indian Institute of Management-Shillong (IIM-S). This is the link- http://www.iims-conquest.in/

It's also features in NexUs-The SIMS HR Newsletter.

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I take you through a journey into a new concept I learnt recently in my Corporate Psychology class. It was one of those classes where you not just hear, but listen. I absorbed every bit I could, as my professor took us in the realms of stories, fables and tales, only to drive home a point. The point which I present in this paper-the concept of Appreciative Inquiry (AI).

AI is a way of life. It is a thought process which should come natural to all human beings. But for Satan. Developed in the 1980’s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, its extent is not limited to the organization it is adapted in. In fact, its essence lies in the energy that gives life to a system. It may be the optimism of innocence a child is blessed of, the aggressiveness and lose temperament of a sales guy or the rigid timings of an office.

AI finds its roots in the concepts of Organization Development (OD), an area, most mature organizations have focused on and the relatively new ones are embracing it with keenness. When an OD consultant is called for help, he mechanically looks for problems. And if you go looking for something you are bound to find it. So you have problems glaring right into your face and appear bigger than they were before you have arrived. Thus the problem is to go hunting for problem itself. The better choice is to ask the right question, as to –“what works well here?” This is the first assumption AI settles itself on. What works right for an organization, for an individual, is the entry point of the intervention. How wonderful is it to seek the best first, than focusing on the miser negativities? The role of the OD consultant then becomes that of a facilitator who looks for clues to what made excellence possible and the conditioning to replicate it. So he seeks solutions that already exist, magnify what works, and works well for the organization and focus on life and not decay.

AI has the propensity to engage the entire organization, deriving its focus from the OD interventions which work in a similar fashion engaging everybody from the lowest link to the top notch hook. The inquiry discovers data that is then used to envision the future based on the analysis of the rich positive past. What we focus on becomes our reality. And this second assumption precisely sets the stage-this time on fire. The fire which will lead the individuals to perform with a sense of urgency-because now what they see is success and not barriers. This shares ground with the positivity which was the basis and is the guide channelizing and carving out new routes to possibilities of success.

In doing so, the lessons learnt on conflict management, values, assumptions and beliefs, the nerve to value other’s belief should be held close to oneself, because in the process of leading change it is imperative to value differences. Innovating what will be-the delivery part of the plan comes next. No doubt creativity is born in chaos but AI aims at a systematic quest of a discovery of strengths and assets of an organization. It works like a highlighter pen-making the strengths more visible than anything else-right opposite to the Dilbert method of highlighting the counterproductive workplace elements.

The magical thing about AI is its scope. It begins with an individual, encompasses the organization and stretches its abode to accommodate the society at large, serving with the same basic four ‘D’ cycle of-Discover, Dream, Design and Delivery, as I mentioned above. Also its application can be seen in variant fields of healthcare, education, community services, corporate and government organizations. It’s this beauty of AI that caught not only my attention but interest too. If I were to be a part of an organization which encourages its stakeholders to be enthusiastic change agents, the basics of AI would help me derive a model suitable to the situation. After all life is what you make of it. Let’s make it positive.

-Simar

HR Batch 2008-2010
Symbiosis Institute Of Management Studies
PUNE